Things That Make You Go "Duh!" - Saturday 5/9/2009

I picked up the round cookie sheet that I've been resting the sprouts on, and found this huge rust stain on the counter.

Duh. Took a lot of scrubbing to get this up.



During cleanup, I stacked too much stuff in the sink. As the pan on top filled with water, it tilted suddenly and dumped about half of its contents on me!

It's a two-duh day!

Accept No Substitution - Thursday 5/7/2009

'Cause you know that imitators are popping up all I over the place.... Huh? Stopped by the Newhall Farmer's Market to pick up some tomatoes. One day I will get some corn on the cob here, but I was on my way to the gym to a spinning class and didn't need any more food.

The class went better than I expected, since I hadn't been for about 5 weeks, since before the most recent bout of bronchitis. I coughed afterward, but not during and really worked hard hard hard for an hour. Whoo!


Liiiiiiight. Pleeeease.

How to Deal - Wednesday 5/6/2009

Yeah, so our office is on work-share again for a couple of months. The writer's strike of last year is still reverberating through the industry in that small companies like ours with about a dozen employees in that financial reserves were depleted. Then there was the lovely threatened actor's strike led by SAG, which meant that a lot of productions put off starting, so we're not getting the usual boost from increased movie production this year.

Anywhooo.... All this is to say that I have today off. Next week I'll work three days and will receive unemployment for the other two.

My advice if you're in this boat is to figure out the cheapest things that you enjoy doing and make sure you continue to do them. For me, investing a couple of bucks in a cup of coffee is well worth it. I get to sit at Barnes & Noble Cafe and look at a stack of books...and decide which ones to request from the library.


Mmm. Double espresso goodness.

Other good things to do : keep moving (hiking's cheap!), read, connect with friends, listen to music, get outside.


Grow stuff. I've started cucumbers and herbs. The big sprouts are cucumbers...they weren't even out of the soil in the morning!

There and Therer - Tuesday 5/5/2009

Aah, too bad I don't have time to have breakfast on Braveheart's patio. It's a beautiful morning.


The view from her front porch...it's even more lovely in the evening. Her house is on the market. Sigh. Anyone want to buy a nice house in L.A.?


One of my other favorite buildings in L.A. This is on the corner of Hollywood and Highland, and you've seen it from other angles, if you've read this blog very long.


Hmm. So it used to be a bank building. Now there are vacant store front spaces available for rent.

This Doesn't Look Safe - Monday 5/4/2009

From directly behind this truck on the freeway, I couldn't even figure out what the tall stuff was. Down on the surface street, it became clear that it's sections of chain link fence.

Maybe he was transporting this at 5:15 a.m. to avoid hearing the opinions of the CHiPs?

Water Board Awash With Perks - Sunday 5/3/2009

Hey, it's not my headline.

Hydra pointed this out on our way into Trader Joe's. Unfortunate.

How to Play with a Toy - Sunday 5/3/2009

Dodger versus the large plastic ball with two little balls inside it.



Toys are only really fun if you can break them. African Grey motto: Everything comes apart.


Success!

Now, to get the tiny bell out of the little ball...

Sundry Drive - Sunday 5/3/2009

We decided to drive out to the Rock Inn in Lake Hughes for lunch on Sunday.

There's a better photo of the whole place at their website. Apparently, they've stopped calling it Harley's Rock Inn, and are playing up the historic aspect of this 80+ year old hotel and restaurant. I wish I had taken a shot of all the gleaming Harley's and Harley-wanna-be bikes out front of the restaurant.

It's pretty loud on a Sunday afternoon. Wonder how much sleep one's likely to get in the hotel on a Saturday night. There is really not much else to this little town, except Papa's Market across the street.


Love the backs on these bar stools. It's quite a crowd. Lots of middle-aged weekend bikers mixed with real mildly alarming bikers.

Hydra walks into a biker bar wearing the Detroit Redwings hat his cousin brought him from Michigan. There's a hockey game on the tube in the corner. Yep, you got it: Detroit Redwings v. Anaheim Ducks in Stanley Cup playoffs!

There's a heavily tattooed, drunk, serious biker dude behind us yelling nearly incoherantly from time to time, but apparently in synchronization with what's going on in the hockey game. It takes us a while to figure out he's rooting for the Redwings. Whew.


I like this elderly lady sitting by the window reading a book and drinking coffee. I expect to be that woman when I am her age.


On the way back, we stop to look at the new electricity transmission lines going in. I think these are going to help get the energy being created by the wind farms in Tehachapi down to the folks in Santa Clarita and beyond. The pieces look like giant tinker toys.

Hydra admits that he has seen pieces of these things being airlifted in by helicopter from his commute up Bouquet Canyon and Vasquez Canyon roads. Harumph! Why was I not alerted sooner!?


The idyllic Pitchfork llama ranch.



This llama, not wanting to be sold and carted away from paradise, heads for the brush.



Back at home after running errands, I return to the scene of the yard work. Tore out or moved old straggling African Daisies and planted new ones.


Added new soil and rearranged the rocks. These will fill in nicely through the summer.


Added a pot of Gerbera daisies and some geraniums to the front porch. A little color in amongst the succulents. Also started cucumber and herb seeds in one of those peat-pot starter terrariums.

Okay, now a plea for help. Has anyone ever had a pair of this style of grass shears that actually works? I've bought probably 3 pairs in the past 8 years and none of them have done much more than crimp the grass. Do you know of a brand that works?

Yard Goods - Saturday 5/2/2009

Why do I always forget to take a before photo? This is the middle photo.

Trust me, I spent about half of the 3 1/2 hours I spent on the yard was right here. I took out most of the rocks in order to get the neighbors' leaves out from between them. And then, yes, I put them back.

Tomorrow I want to replace the African daisies with fresh ones.

I enjoy digging, planting, even weeding. I am less enthusiastic about cleaning up afterward.

The whole thing of sweeping a sidewalk is kind of mystifying. I mean, isn't the whole point of the outdoors to have a place to keep your dirt?



I picked up 249 apricots from the back yard. The other day I picked up 118. There are maybe 3 dozen left on the branches.

Big winds in spring: boo! hiss!

Bloomin' Lovely - Friday 5/1/2009

The mini roses are back.

Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti - Thursday 4/30/2009

I bought 3 pounds of fava beans for $4.00 at the farmer's market last weekend. I have no idea if that's a good price, but it sounded okay to me.

I've been hearing about the much-revered fava on Evan Kleiman's Good Food on KCRW. It's one of the culinary harbingers of spring.

The woman who grew these beauties opened one and let me have a taste. They have a unique pungency that I like.


Isn't that one of the most gorgeous things you've ever seen? I mean, look at the blend of colors! The pod is lined with nature's version of foam and velvet. These things must be special.


They are described as labor-intensive. The chefs I've heard extolling their virtues also admit to letting a kitchen assistant prep them. First you take them out of the pods.


Then you blanch them to make taking the soft inner shell off easier. I guess that's a redundant sentence, since the definition of blanching is the process of immersing food in boiling water and then cold water for the express purpose of removing the skin.

Ew! So then why do we say things like, "The very thought of it made her blanch"?

Or, maybe it's "The very thought of it made her Blanche." As in Blanche DuBois. Now, that I'd like to see.

Wait a minute. Where were we?

Pay attention, will you?


Apologies for the blurry photograph. It's not all that easy to peel fava beans with one hand and man the camera with the other.



It took me a while to find the way to do this. Getting that skin off is easier if you detach the skin by rolling it back and forth between thumb and finger while pinching. See how the skin is kind of loose there?

Then use your thumbnail to pierce the skin, and it will slip right out. I don't know how to make this easier if you don't have a thumbnail handy. As you may have noticed, I tried using a knife in the previous photo. But that didn't work terribly well and felt a little dangerous.

Not that "whee it's a roller coaster" type of danger. More the "I don't want to spend tonight in the emergency room with a bloody dishrag around my thumb" type of danger.



There are probably tons of recipes out there, but I wanted something simple after all that toiling away, so I made pasta with fava beans.

Sauteed garlic in olive oil, added tomatoes and cooked lightly. Added in fresh basil and the fava beans, just enough to heat them up. Tossed them on the pasta with Parmesan cheese and freshly ground pepper.

Ooh, good! Hydra made himself a hamburger, so there are leftovers for tomorrow.

I'll bet if you had a creative cook in the house, you'd eat what she prepared, wouldn't you?

Yogalicious! - Monday 4/27/2009

The omelet kit I brought to work with me for lunch today. Farm fresh free range eggs from Acton, CA . As close as it gets without having chicken feathers all over the back yard.

Yes, you can make an omelet of sorts in the microwave. I sliced and cooked the mushrooms for a couple of minutes, then added the tomatoes for 30 seconds. Cooked the eggs in a separate (oiled) bowl. Put the sugar snap peas on top of the cooked eggs and poured the hot mushroom/tomato mix over them to heat them a little.

Yum. Really.


OneL thought I might like to put these cheese chicks crackers on my blog. She was right!

But mostly, I wanted to tell you that I finally got back to the gym after almost a month's absence. The first three weeks were due to a bout of bronchitis that left me coughing after I even walked fast. Then the last week was just procrastination and the fact that I had to renew my gym membership (which I got a great deal on through Costco).

But anyway, last night I went for a yoga class and it was fabulous. Of course I am not as limber as I was a month ago--and honestly, I am a bit flexibility-challenged at best--but it was terrific. I seriously became blissed out by the end of the class.

I wish I could get to yoga more often. It's a complete treat. I could feel the vertebrae in my upper back easing apart in the most necessary way.

I returned a block to the teacher after class and told her it was wonderful and that I was a little loopy. I really was. Just euphoric. She put her hands up in a sort of double-high-five gesture, and then almost knocked me over with her gentle palm-slap. I guess I really was floating.

Self-Watering Planters II + Herb Gardening - Sunday 4/26/2009

Went to the College of the Canyons Farmer's Market in the morning, but forgot my camera. Sigh. Bought some fresh free range eggs from a farm located in Acton! (Maybe they'll let me stop by and pick up from them directly without having to drive 20 miles to the market.) Also went a little nuts with fresh herbs and veggies.

Ready to load with dirt. The pipe is so you can add water to the reservoir after it's filled with dirt.


Layered in the potting mix, adding water as I went along.



Added the weed-proof plastic, which also helps reduce evaporation, which is a big problem out here in the heat of summer. (I'm talking 110+ degrees now and again.)

Getting the plants planted through the plastic was one of the more tricky parts of this project. The hardest part was cutting the tubs down and cutting out the lids, just because the material is not terribly stable and it kept binding up the jigsaw.


Four kinds of tomatoes! And that's an artichoke in the pot in the middle. Not sure how much the artichoke will like being in a pot, but I'm gonna give it a shot.






The rosemary got way out of hand while I wasn't paying attention! Also moved the savory (in the foreground) to another part of the yard, since I don't really use it much. The organo? There's no getting rid of it, even if we wanted to. Thank goodness Hydra uses it in his spaghetti sauce!


After.

I know, it's not all that pretty and it needs more shaping, but after an hour with the hedge trimmers and hand clippers, this is where I needed to stop. Now there's room for more herbs!




I think I may have harvested almost enough rosemary to season the fingerling potatoes I bought at the farmer's market this morning!


Fresh sage, parsley and thyme. The first bunches of these I planted 8 years ago are either gone or too woody to be of much use.

Hey, I should write a song about my herb garden....


Hydra pointed out the way this ornament was catching the evening light as I finished up my day's work. Much to his credit, bum knee and all, he trimmed all the grass in the yard, which is a job I most sincerely do not enjoy.


End of day treat: watercress soup. Which is actually not all that great as it turns out--a bit of a bitterish aftertaste, but it's what's for lunch this week. I used some of that chicken stock from Friday. When else am I going to get enough watercress for soup with leftovers for salads for $1.50?

Also had an amazing salad with leaf lettuce, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, celery, Persian cucumbers, basil, dill (it's sooo good in a salad!), a little bleu cheese, tarragon vinegar and olive oil. Crunch!

Self-watering Planters - Part I - Saturday 4/25/2009

I went online to look at some brand name self-watering planters that I saw at Antipasta's house, and found wonderful directions for making them at home. Many thanks to the clever and generous Josh Mandel for publishing his design on his website. I won't go into much detail here, because everything you need to know to do it yourself can be found there.

Above: the raw materials in the back of the Tahoe. It takes two 18 gallon tubs to make each one. He recommends dark colors, but I am not going to walk away from lavender.



Getting started. Yay, I love a project!



Having the right tools is so important!


As it turned out, the batteries on our multi-function drill were not fully powered up. Enough for household stuff, but not enough to run the jigsaw.

In the interim, Hydra suggested I use the 1 1/2 inch drill bit with his Old School power drill to cut out the holes in the center of the part that will support the dirt. The big opening will allow water to wick up from the reservoir below, and you won't be able to see it when it's full of dirt.

Drilling all these holes was too much fun. Yeah, they called me Stagecraft around the IPFW Theater Department when I worked in the scene shop for Work Study.




See how it fits together?



I used one of the extra lids to carry the waiting plants around to the more sheltered front porch to await placement.

Decided that it's safe to move all the succulents out of the bathtub. They seem happy to be outside again.


The Granny Smith is budding out nicely!



Reward: freshly roasted asparagus with garlic and Parmesan.